Sorry about this but we can only control the themes that are hosted here. If someone decides to offer another theme with the same name on a completely unrelated site, there’s nothing we can do about it.

No apology necessary. I’m not really upset about it, since no real damage was done.

Still, there has to be something to be done about it. As you say, it’s completely unrelated, and yet WordPress flags it as needing to be updated, and then DOES the update, even though it’s completely different. That’s not ok.

I can’t say I know how to do it better, but if all it’s doing is checking the name I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before, and it will likely happen to someone else who doesn’t know enough to do their testing on either localhost or a staging domain.

Again as you say, there’s nothing you can do about someone naming their theme the same as another, so I would hope some other sort of check will be ran against the installed themes to make sure it is indeed the same one.

I have to believe there is something to be done about WordPress making a false upgrade notification that could wipe out someone’s site if they weren’t careful.

I blindly trusted WordPress on this one and hit the update button without checking, so that was my fault. If I would have checked the release notes I would have seen it was different. I certainly won’t do that again.

so I would hope some other sort of check will be ran against the installed themes to make sure it is indeed the same one.

What would you suggest is used for this check beyond the theme’s name? Pretty much anything else in a WPORG theme can change from one version to the next.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel your pain. I once had a situation where I was working on a custom theme locally that (unbeknownst to me) had the same name as a WPORG theme. Early one morning, I logged onto my local server, saw an update notice and clicked update automatically. One week’s work lost. Moral: don’t click on stuff until you have had enough coffee.

I have no idea what else could be done. I have no idea how they implement this.

They couldn’t check the author and author’s url along with the theme name? That would have likely prevented this update trigger. Can’t each theme in the WPORG have some sort of assigned numerical ID, which if it is NOT reported (as it wouldn’t be for themes not in the repository) then it doesn’t match?

I don’t know if that’s feasible since I don’t know the underlying mechanics of how the WPORG works.

Again, luckily I was just horsing around with new themes, so I’m not burned by this at all. Sorry for your experience, but you’ve now confirmed that this happened more than once and will likely keep happening.

I’m certainly not worried for myself, but for others who may pay the price for trusting the upgrade notification. Saying “well, you shoulda checked before you upgraded” is fine but I can say almost the same thing back to wordpress “You shoulda checked more thoroughly before saying this theme has an upgrade ready”.

However, since I admittedly know nothing about the procedures of WPORG, I have no choice but to believe you. If you say nothing can be done, then nothing can be done.

They couldn’t check the author and author’s url along with the theme name?

Not with any accuracy, no. It is not unknown for an older theme to be taken over by another developers.

Can’t each theme in the WPORG have some sort of assigned numerical ID, which if it is NOT reported (as it wouldn’t be for themes not in the repository) then it doesn’t match?

Not as far as I am aware, no. I don’t think that would work well with SVN (which is what the theme repo uses). But you might want to raise this with the Theme Review team. They’re the people who could perhaps push some sort of practical change through – technical limitations permitting.